03:00 pm
Transition Watch: Mona Sutphen
Although much of the coverage of Obama’s new White House team has focused on the fact that most of the appointees so far have considerable Hill experience. As Ezra Klein noted yesterday, “This is not an administration that will lack the cell phone numbers of key congressional players.”
Klein goes on to note an outlier among the Hill vets: Mona Sutphen, who was named one of two White House Deputy Chiefs of Staff:
Sutphen is a slightly odder case — she’s a former foreign service office who has been a manager at Sandy Berger’s consultancy and recently co-authored The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise.
.I’m actually rather excited about this appointment. Suthpen is one of the smartest, most able thinkers on foreign policy out there, representing a new generation whose defining years were not the Cold War or 9/11, but rather the Clinton Administration (h/t Yglesias):
The Next American Century represents, in many ways, a distillation of the Obama worldview: America as a central player but not necessarily the dominant one. As I’ve noted elsewhere,
[A]n Obama administration is likely to pursue a foreign policy based on sound strategic principles and coherent tactics. Realism [will] trump ideology, and principles [will] trump interests. Call it pragmatic idealism, if you must apply a label.
In addition, an Obama administration will repair America’s disastrously dysfunctional foreign policy apparatus: providing the State Department with the resources it needs; streamlining foreign assistance; reestablishing a robust and proactive public diplomacy; and clarifying the overlapping roles of State, NSC, Defense, and Homeland Security. It will emphasize both innovation and results, rewarding creativity and encouraging critical thinking.
As far as I know, there’s never been a former (or current) foreign service officer who has served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff. And since Midwest already has violated my Sorkintorium, I’ll note that no major character on The West Wing focused on foreign policy — that’s just not the way it was done back then (or in the Bush White House for that matter).
Unfortunately, it also points to the sad reality of a foreign service career in this day and age — talented mid-level officers are far more likely to leave for greener pastures than stick around for twenty years trying to get an Ambassadorship. Had Sutphen stayed at State, she would be, most likely, a Deputy Chief of Mission somewhere, on the cusp of finding out whether she had been accepted into the Senior Foreign Service.
To put it bluntly, which would you rather be at a similar point in your career: DCM in the Kyrgyz Republic or Deputy Chief of Staff to the most exciting political figure in thirty years?
One other note: Sutphen once served in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), my old stomping grounds (we did not overlap). Given the fact that, under both Clinton and Bush, DRL was viewed as a career-killer by many foreign service officers, I have to say I’m pretty happy to see someone’s career not whither and die because she cared/cares about human rights.
If, as expected, Gregory Craig is named White House Counsel, Obama will have two State Department veterans in key positions. For all the talk about the Capitol Hill veterans dominating, it’s worthwhile to note that no previous administration had put foreign policy experts in key positions outside the NSC apparatus.
You can find Sutphen’s bio (h/t Ambinder) below the fold.
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